Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 122
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Popular Culture Review
religious zeal but because of the state of cultural studies today: it may be godless
but it has not shaken off theology. In fact, the student of medievalism can quickly
identify a pattern that runs throughout our exposition of medieval studies, Maritain,
and cultural studies:
Medieval Studies. (1) At the end of the nineteenth century. Pope
Leo XIII argues that ‘"greed” is the “canker o f modern
civilization.” (2) Medievalists see in the founding o f the
Medieval Academy of America the possibility of examining
the dynamics of religious culture as a cure for greed; (3) cultural
critics such as Ortega y Gasset see religious culture (“The New
Middle Ages”) as an alternative to capitalism.
Maritain. (1) Maritain tells us that a sacramental culture cannot
thrive in a culture of taking; (2) he insists that Thomism persists
and insists in all (creative) cultural activities as (3) an alternative
to capitalism.
Cultural Studies. (I) Cultural critics tell us that “academic
culture” cannot thrive in the day and age of transnational capital;
(2)they insist that a genealogy or history of the particular (what
the “literary” has become), a history of the colonized and the
dispossessed, persists and insists even in the wake of (3) global
capitalism.^
This sort of “chop-logic” exposition is, no doubt, frustrating. However, the reader
will need to recognize that these narratives arrived prepackaged at medievalism’s
door. We find the narrative for the development of medieval studies in Ralph Adams
Clam’s “The New Middle Ages,” an essay commemorating the eighth anniversary
of the founding of the Medieval Academy of America in 1934. The second narrative,
of course, comes fi*om my syncretic reading of Maritain. The third narrative was
taken from Bill Readings’ much-acclaimed The University in RuinsJ
The disciplinary movement outlined in these narratives is sketchy but not
without a logic: history takes the place of the place of philosophy which had taken
the place of theology. This exposition is obviously subject to revision, but even in
its present schematic form, it may help us to understand why the Medieval Academy
of America would devote an entire issue of Speculum to “The New Medievalism”
and “The New Philology”: the academy has hoped for the New Medievalism since
the 1930’s. In fact, American scholars of the Middle Ages, from time to time,
might be encouraged to reinvent the New Medievalism. *